Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 11, 2014 @06:57PM
from the crack-in-the-wall dept.

alphadogg (971356) writes China makes headlines every other week for its censorship of the Internet, but few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them. This IDG News Service writer has lived in China for close to six years and censorship has been a near constant, lurking in the background ready to "harmonize" the Web and throw a wrench in his online viewing. It's been especially evident this month. Google's services, which don't follow the strict censorship rules, are currently blocked. How long that will last is unknown, but it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month — an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember.

My only experience with the Great Firewall is with a couple of chinese students returning home and asking why OUR VPN stopped working, and me not knowing what to say them because I did not want to be politically incorrect. At the end of the day I told them all was ok in our side, and for them to talk to their uni administrator. However I had the suspicion it was blocked, and they might have known it too. So at the end of the day, VPN use is not so linear.

Last year the GFW began blocking OpenVPN connections. Many VPN providers were blocked, their DNS entries erased from the standard DNS servers that the Chinese ISPs use. The way around that now is to hardcode a DNS server like OpenDNS or Google DNS and to use PPTP or L2TP VPN connections. I can attest that those still work, I was back in China over the Chinese New Year holidays. I was able to use VPN on my laptop connected to a Shanghai ISP as well as on my Android phone using China Mobile HSPA+ data.

Why do you think China's attempts at censoring the net would be any more successful than ours? Has blocking any torrent site ever lasted longer than a few nanoseconds 'til someone found a way around it and word spread?

China's attempts to censor the net is magnitudes more successful than ours (US) primarily because the US does not censor the net at all although tv would lead you to think otherwise, and China censors the net greatly.

You don't get it, do you. If you were in China, this discussion wouldn't be happening, and simply for posting here you could be in jail.

In the US, we are given the illusion of freedom and transparency so that we feel superior, poke fun and insults at the systems of other systems, and don't question our own system. Propaganda is most effective when people don't realize it as such. Different methods, same result.

This is why everyone hates America. We are so damn dense and lack any global perspective.

Really? The US censors your internet on a national (or any) level comparable to China? Really? You have to VPN to get on CNN/FB/Twitter? You have use TOR to get on Slashdot? Using any of the above sites is illegal in the US?

"But, for the most part, the main thing I noticed was the sluggishness of a high latency connection. It wasn't always clear if a site had been blocked or it it was just failing to load because incompetent web admins insist upon loading hundreds of scripts that each take the latency hit. I'd have sites take multiple seconds to load as a result."

Request policy and noscript solves this problem along with a great many others in one go.

I've been running an obfuscated bridge for about a year now. Setting up was pretty easy and it's been pain-free since then, especially since bandwidth usage limits can be set.

For the uninitiated, a bridge is basically an unpublished entry point into the Tor system; unpublished means you have to send an email to or visit a certain server to be given the address of just one rather than being in the directory for all to see at once, meaning that it

TOR quite simply does not work in China. I find it hard to understand why so many people here cannot see how easy it is to recognise protocols connected with TOR, VPN, Proxies, etc. and block any user that uses any forbidden protocol. None of these things work, not because they block the hubs or the addresses but because the they block the protocols.

There, you're done. Yes, that really works, and if you're a tourist, the chances of really getting into trouble over that are, well, not huge. Some system will notice, somewhere - but you'll be gone after two to four weeks, anyways. It's not hard to get around the firewall - it is hard to get around it for a long time without showing up on the radar.

Yeah, good luck, your lifespan is measured in days. If you are careful and lucky you can complain about SOME things, and people do let their opinions be known about GENERAL things "its very polluted here, this should be fixed!" or "food is too expensive!" etc. The government is pretty sensitive about public opinion up to a certain point. It is just always hard to tell if they will react to your complaints by fixing the problem, or killing you.

So it's like a work or school network that covers an entire country. "Few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them," is total crap. Many, many people know exactly what it's like. Plenty of people outside China have been fired, expelled, or jailed for getting around access controls. Kids today are spoiled brats who grow up with home Internet and no restrictions as long as mommy pays the Internet bill. They have no comprehension of what

Plenty of people outside China have been fired, expelled, or jailed for getting around access controls.

Getting expelled from not following some school's ToS is far different than living where the government is doing it to you at home, and you could be executed if caught.. Getting fired from a job, well its your own damned fault. ( sounds more like you are the spoiled brat here )

Also, who has been jailed due to 'firewall' circumvention? ( other than perhaps some 3rd world country, as they dont count )

They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.

Who is 'they'?

At a personally uncritical time, I remember seeing a clip a few years ago of U.S. President Truman being pissed while storming out of some international game changing economic summit after the second world war (in the late 1940's). Being asked what happened, he responded with "They're trying to set it up so that they'll put all of us, everyone, permanently in debt forever." or something to that effect.

I've been trying to relocate it with no success to see how much of it was misunderstood by my personal op

...with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month â" an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember.

It's nice to want things.

Thing about it is, if China's ruling party could hold on to power without committing further abuses then time would probably actually be on their side for forgetting about Tiananmen. After all, my own country committed terrible atrocities throughout its existence and we simply look at those transgressions in a historical context, but

limiting the amount of time that our leaders are in power (at least the President) and peacefully transitioning between those leaders makes it easier to let go. China doesn't have any of that going for them.

I lived in China for 10 years. I don't like their censorship but I have to admit, they are very good at it. And they've developed something that the NSA can only wet dream about. I shudder to think how much computing power is used. They don't simply block content, they also modify it (text and images, particularly). For example, if you're looking at some standard western porn (white man fucking a white woman) they run image filters to shrink the penis size. There are some image artifacts but if you we

Well, the women are awesome. The rest of it? Sure, the government is pro-business and pro-capitalism, except its THEIR business and capitalism. In China the govt officials are the ones with the money, and LOTS of it. Corruption is astronomical. Unless you're in cahoots with some guys with a lot of 'face' you aren't going anywhere, and you can bet they get the fillet mignon cut of whatever you build. It makes the tax rates in the US quite equitable. There's LOTS of red tape too, though of course again how much that matters depends on whom you are connected to. The middle class in China is microscopic. If you were in downtown of a tier 1 city then you might get the impression, surrounded in your nice westerner bubble, that there were lots of well-off people around, but if you actually went out and met the regular Chinese people and talked to the people serving you food and selling you things and made friends with them you'd find out that life for the average chinese is pretty rough. Now go out to the countryside, or even tier 3 cities (prefect level towns for instance) of which there are 1000's and you find there's only a very small veneer of 'middle class' people.

As for the economy being 'robust', the banks all collapsed in the late 90's, ALL of them are insolvent. Most of the major businesses, same thing (the state owned ones). There's a whole zombie financial and economic sector that is just propped up with tax money or patronage in some form or other. There are a lot of businesses, yes, and a huge export sector, lots of growth, etc. There is also 300 million underemployed people, etc. The realestate bubble in China is 10x the size of the US one, and its teetering right now. Frankly I'm out, and I'm getting my g/f out too before something busts loose and it goes down like the US did in '07. Even the big financial analysts are looking pretty scared now. Housing is slowing and China is going to have a big bump.

I live in China. Everyone I know hops the GFW with ease. It is a non-issue on laptops and cell phones.These guys have a storefront in Shanghai:http://vpninja.net/ [vpninja.net]You go to the store, you pay in Chinese currency and they give you a log in. It is fast and reliable.Lots of people I know use Astrill. (astrill.com)Of course anyone who is actually worried about security will set up their own server abroad and use putty or OpenVPN to access YouTube.

I've spent some time in various parts of China. I simply set up 2 AWS micro instances running SQUID listening only on localhost and then ssh tunneled my laptop into them (I set up several ports for sshd to listen on just in case they blocked one or more). Had no problems. This has been known to work for quite some time reliably. Now and then you'd get a slowdown or your connections would drop, but overall it worked fine. Fire up your SSH client, use the -L option to tunnel a local port over to squid (and th

Of course anyone who is actually worried about security will set up their own server abroad and use putty or OpenVPN to access YouTube.

The last time I was there, OpenVPN connections were being blocked, while openvpn had worked perfectly 6 months earlier. In fact, on that trip, all attempts to run openvpn over UDP appeared to be blocked (I even tried port 53). I found that ssh (tcp/22) was not being blocked and used that. Later I found suggestions that playing with the MTU of the openvpn traffic would avo

Yes. The blocking changes all the time, and it changes by location. Sites that work at the office might not work at home. Go to the areas that are closer to Xinjiang (the western parts with more Muslims), and it becomes very difficult to get over the GFW. PPTP works nearly 100% of the time. OpenVPN has more issues. It might work for 30 minutes then cut off, then work fine for a few days, then go off for a week.

Err...exactly what you see....
A few sites are blocked (they return an HTTP error), some sites are just excruciatingly slow (Google sites at present), most are exactly the same. And a VPN solves the first two issues.
Do bear in mind that the vast majority of Chinese citizens don't really speak much English, so if you want to see what the locals look at, it would be in Chinese! And the Chinese internet ecosystem is far more vibrant then most countries...taobao, wechat, line, qq, baidu etc etc.
Honestly -

I'm a chemistry teacher at a private school in Kunming, China. I use a VPN to get around. First of all half the battle is the terrible infrastructure here. I use a VPN to access everything I need to but I am constantly in a battle to stay connected with my 1Mb/s 500ping connection. If you don't have a VPN you are pretty crippled for most common sites like Google and social media. BTW Slashdot works fine without a VPN.

Don't feed the troll mate.:D
Regardless of the connection package, our VPN restriction (I'm assuming you use a European or North American server) largely comes down to geography..so the 1Mbit 8Mbit 20Mbit 100Mbit packages offered by the telecoms here largely end up with similar ping and sometimes similar bandwidth over VPN at the end of the day. In-country direct connections, however, the advertised speed is much closer to being realized..

Some set up constant tunnels. Personally I use StrongVPN when not at my office or on office network, so it's sorta like this:
Most of my internet use does not involve a proxy OR VPN, and is perfectly fine. When I need YouTube or Hulu or something, I open StrongVPN L2TP through San Fran. When I'm at work I'm typically going thru a proxy for common services we use like google services or whatever and need no configuration on whichever device I am using. My network connection at home is 20mbit fibre, typicall

few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls

It seems a strange sentiment to express, on a technical site.

I've never been to China, and yet I know EXACTLY what their internet access is like. Anyone here can find out for themselves in 10 minutes flat, by hopping on a proxy located in China, and surfing around.

The only extra bit of knowledge that I gained through my extensive time dealing with it, is how incredibly random, frequently changing, and therefore frustrating and utterly-pointless the IP bans are. Send enough traffic over an IPSec tunnel in a short enough period of time, and expect it to be suddenly blocked one day, only to work again in just a few days.

Another way the Chinese evade censorship is to use oblique terms and references, many of which are quite funny. The Grass-Mud Horse Lexicon [chinadigitaltimes.net] is a compilation of them. (In Mandarin, "grass-mud horse" sounds very close to "fuck your mother" and is a way of evading and poking fun at censorship of vulgar content.)

Tried tested and failed.
China constantly cracks down on new 'evasive' methods of communicating. This year they used tons of other phrases, and were promptly blocked, like "this day" or "may 35th" or "that day" or "spring to summer" or other various 'elusive' terms...blocked. In addition they tried to hide messages in porn. This is all part of the tit-for-tat that, well, often just ends in more and more blockage and nothing more.

I'm going to just say it now. China is stupid. Not the people of China really, but the government is pants-on-head retarded.

They banned the phrase "May 35th". What about "April 65th", "March 96th", "February 124th", or "January 155th"? What about "July -26th" or "July 339th"?

Sure, a good calendar will sort it out quickly, but which calendar? Gregorian? Julian? Hebrew? Are they going to ban "Sivan 1, 1989"? (Pentecost is on Sivan 6, which was June 9th that year.) What about every number between "612921600" a